"Speak only when it improves upon the silence."

- Mahatma Gandhi

but the nature of "cool" is following your own path for your own reasons and being invulnerable to the doubts and assaults of those around you.

To be a pussy is to knuckle under in the face of adversity. To be a pussy is to not fight battles you can win. But to be a pussy is to fight battles because it is expected of you, because it's the easy way out, because it gives your friends and peers a way to shunt you down the pecking order.

Choose where and how you want to spend your intellectual and emotional energy.

You realized that engaging in arguments about polarizing topics based on insufficient information and selective statistics is not the best use of your time.

When you do speak up on a topic, your frenemies will know that it is something you feel strongly about.

I'm going to take a tangential tactic and recommend you view these kinds of arguments through the kind of lens displayed by the Overview Effect. Staying quiet doesn't make you weak, it means you're not willing to engage in the petty. It seems you have already distanced yourself somewhat from arguments like these, but in the broader "pale blue dot" perspective hatemongering and stirring up "debate" is really counterproductive.

After explaining to your friends your reasoning for stopping your debate habits, invite them to do the same. Hopefully they just don't understand why you stopped, and they'll accept an honest reason.

Remember, whether in argumentation or elsewhere, just because you can destroy someone doesn't mean you should.

Silence is a position of restraint.

Restraint requires strength of character.

Strength of character requires ... well ... strength.

All of these above. You just gotta watch shit go down until actions begin to form that infringe upon your understanding and knowledge of self. It's always awkward to say it because it comes across as cocky, but a lot of people don't really have a sense of self beyond what's placed upon them by the environment.